People are generally good, kind, trustworthy, and thoughtful, even total strangers. Don't let a few bad apples spoil the entire crop.
Raam Dev
On My Feet
"Now that I have a baby on the way, maybe a bicycle would be a good thing to have..."
"Maybe instead of walking slowly it would make sense to be able to get home more quickly on a bicycle... maybe spending less time commuting would give me more time with my daughter..."
I've been walking 10,000 steps every day on average for the past few months. It's a 0.7-mile walk from the house to the train station and from there I commute 20 minutes on the train to Central Square, Cambridge where I work from my favorite cafe.
I make the commute back home for lunch around noon, then back to Central Square around two o'clock before finally heading home for the evening around six. In total, I spend over an hour walking outside every day, rain or shine.
We have a car, but we try to use it as little as possible, and I love not needing to drive everywhere. I've grown to despise driving. It's hectic and incredibly stressful on our bodies. (If you're not stressed while driving, you're either not paying enough attention to driving or you're not paying enough attention to your body.)
Fifteen years of driving and more than half a million miles have also taught me how incredibly unnatural the seated position is for our bodies, especially when we're stressed. I don't need more unnatural things stressing my body; I spend enough time sitting at a computer.
I was talking to my friend Cristian about how I commute by walking and riding the train when he suggested that riding a bicycle everywhere would be more exercise, and probably more convenient. After thinking about it for a few minutes I realized that he was right.
If I had a bike, I would have more options. I'd save time. I would be able to get home more quickly from the train station and that would mean I'd be able to spend more time with my daughter (once she's born... any day now!).
I proceeded to search CraigsList for used bikes in this area. I found one right here in Central Square. It was a black, fixed-gear bicycle in nearly new condition, exactly what I was looking for! I emailed the seller and set up a time to look at the bike the next morning. That was yesterday.
As I got ready for work this morning, I imagined myself riding a bike to the train station, or even directly to Central Square.
That's when I began to realize what I love about walking.
A bike would speed up the pace of my life, bringing me closer to driving a car. I'd need to constantly be alert, watching where I'm going and looking out for people, other bikers, cars, etc., just like I'd be doing in a car.
The world would fly by. My attention would be focused on one thing. I wouldn't be able to look up at the sky and watch the clouds, or stop to literally smell the roses.
I could, yes, but I probably wouldn't.
The motion would be more mechanical and less human. I wouldn't be able to feel the muscles in my legs, and my feet, and my hips and think to myself "those muscles are designed for this motion," because they're not designed for a bicycle, or a car; they're designed for walking.
I love my daily walks. They're not an inconvenience at all, but a refresher. I love getting a whiff of air that smells of flowers and closing my eyes to smile inside, or smiling at a baby as he rolls by in a stroller.
I love the way the world bobbles up and down in slow motion with each step I take.
I love that I can instantly pause and capture a photo of the Earth.
I love being able to read, or not, when I'm riding on the train.
I love smiling at the dogs and following the butterflies with my eyes until they disappear behind a wall of green leaves.
But really, I love being able to take a deep breath of air and smell the earth, to be able to take my huaraches off and walk barefoot and feel the damp earth under my feet.
On a bike, I'm not connected to the earth in the same way. On a bike, my body is just the engine to a machine; I'm only half the equation. But on my feet, I am the machine and the engine. I'm the complete package. It's all natural, as nature designed it.
Would using a bicycle save me time and let me spend more of it with my daughter? Sure, but what good would that extra time be if acquiring it meant she would spend time with a more stressed out daddy?
What good would teaching her present-mindedness be if my mind was always focused on something else, always hurrying here and there as if right now wasn't good enough?
It's so easy to go astray, to make choices with the best intentions in mind only to have those choices take us in a direction that leaves us worse off than when we started.
When it comes to time, the choice that contributes to mindfulness is always the best choice. Mindfulness slows time and gives us more of it. I feel most mindful on my feet.
Experts at Proclaiming Knowledge
Mind Over Matter
Happiness
Your Anniversary
A few days ago a friend emailed me with some bad news: his friend and his friend's daughter recently died in a plane crash in Kenya along with the pilot. The plane went missing in bad weather and the wreckage and remains were found shortly thereafter.
We never know when it will be our time, which is, ironically, much the same as for our birth.
My daughter is due any day now (officially on the 19th, but it could be any day) and it feels like a waiting game. Will today be the day? I just don't know.
In the same way I could wonder, will tomorrow be the day I die? I don't know that either. We never really know until it happens.
I heard something once that really stuck with me: Every year we pass over the anniversary of our death.
We may not know which day--will it be a Friday? or a Wednesday? or the 20th of July?--but we do know that it will happen, and every year that day silently passes through our lives unannounced.
While walking outside yesterday and thinking about this I realized that the opposite is also true: Every year we pass over the anniversary of our birth. Right now, I don't know when that date will be for my daughter, just as I don't know when the opposite date will be true and settled for me.
In some ways this sounds depressing, but to me it feels freeing. If I don't know, and I have no way of knowing with certainty, then how can I let it worry me? And if there's nothing to worry me, then only now remains to be enjoyed.
We know that life comes and goes. This is fact. What we don't know is how much we'll get to enjoy it.
Broken Telephone
For those who are not familiar, broken telephone, also called Chinese Whispers1, is a game in which one person whispers a message to another and the message gets passed through a line of people until the last player announces the message to the entire group.
Errors typically accumulate in the retellings so that the statement announced by the last player differs significantly from the one uttered by the first.
It's human nature; we're imperfect. But there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, it's what makes us beautiful. It's why we invent and play games like broken telephone.
But now everyone--you and me included--is playing a very grown-up game of broken telephone. And we play it every day. In this adult version of the game, the whispers can be dangerous and the game is much bigger.
We can whisper something to anyone anywhere on the planet and they can then whisper that message to someone else, anywhere else on the planet.
By participating in the social web and using modern communication tools--cell phones, text messages, social media platforms--we're all participating in a global game of broken telephone, transmitting messages from one person to the next at the speed of light.
But what happens to our message as it gets transmitted? What happens when we retell something we've heard and then people start whispering our version of the story to others around the web, emailing it, tweeting it, and texting it?
What makes this adult version of of the game dangerous?
To find out, let's first start with a little history.
How Disinformation Killed my Grandfather
Cigarettes are a classic example of how false information can be dangerous. Many of us can relate to this particular example because it happened recently enough in history that our parents (or ourselves, if we're old enough) had first-hand experience with mass-exposure to false information that was propagated for financial gain.
There was a time when cigarettes were advertised as being good and healthy for you, a time when doctors would come on to the television and tell you what brand of cigarettes they smoked.
There was a time in very recent history when doctors would tell you that cigarettes were perfectly safe, even for moms and babies.
Today that just sounds ignorant and stupid.
But why? Why does that sound ignorant and stupid now? What makes us so much different than the people living fifty years ago? What reason did those people have to question the doctors? What reason did they have to doubt the people who appeared to know more than they did?
That's just it. They didn't have any good reason to doubt them.
The difference between fifty years ago and today is that now so many of us know the truth. Now so many of us have heard stories or have family members, as I do, who have died of cigarette-related diseases.
Now the truth about cigarettes is louder than any amount of false information and now even the people who continue to smoke cigarettes accept the reality of that truth.
How History is Repeating Itself
In 1953, members of the tobacco industry hired the firm Hill & Knowlton to help counteract findings that suggested cigarette smoking led to lung cancer.2
Just think about that: the tobacco industry was openly and legally paying a business to spread false information that would guarantee more sales of cigarettes to people would later die from lung cancer, like my grandfather did when I was growing up.
But that's all behind us now, right? We live in a more informed and more civilized society and the truth is everywhere, right? With all that we know, we couldn't possibly let stuff like that happen again, right?
Wrong.
In 2009, members of ANGA (America's Natural Gas Alliance), a lobbying organization for the gas industry, spread $80 million in funds across several agencies, including Hill & Knowlton (yes, the same firm hired to spread false information about cigarettes in the 50s), to try and influence decisions on the process of gas extraction known as hydraulic fracturing.3
But here's what we know: Gas extraction and hydraulic fracturing (also known as 'fracking') release toxins into the local water supply that have known adverse health effects. These include neurological, pulmonary, gastroenterological, dermatological, immunological, hematological, endocrinological, reproductive, and genetic illnesses and abnormalities.4
I can't even pronounce all of those, but I bet they're not good for me.
Environment-related cancers can take 15 to 30 years to develop, so many of the negative side-effects won't even be seen until it's too late, just like the negative side-effects for cigarettes.
But you have nothing to worry about, right? You don't hear much about fracking so it probably won't effect you, right?
If you think you're safe, check Fracking Across the United States to see if your water supply (which comes from all directions) may be tainted and slowly killing you and your family (and certainly poisoning the water supply for future generations).
(By the way, it has also been found that Hill & Knowlton employees modify Wikipedia articles, so beware of the links I reference in this essay.)
Companies with a financial interest in spreading false information are still paying big money to ensure that such information remains the status quo and they'll continue doing so as long as it's more profitable than allowing the truth to become the norm.
Blatant lies by 'industry experts' who are paid to say what they're told to say? Lies and false information being openly touted as truth? It's still happening today. And with the Internet and social media, it's happening faster than ever.
And we might be helping.
Whispering to Millions at the Speed of Light
Lies outpace the truth whenever those lies have more backing them than the truth. Today, in a world driven largely by financial interest, there is a lot of money supporting false information.
The people in charge of spreading that false information (who may not even be aware the information they're tasked with spreading is false) recognize that you are their greatest asset. They recognize that you are their greatest communication tool.
What do we know about spreading information (false or otherwise) to large groups of people? We know that sensationalism is king, that if something is shocking, or affects us emotionally in some way, we're far more likely to share it with others.
We are incredibly emotional creatures. We release emotion by expressing and sharing it with whoever will listen. If we're not careful, what we share can stray from the truth. This is most likely to happen with things that make us angry or upset.
Take for example the recent news that two US Marine Harrier jets dropped bombs onto the heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef in Australia.
On Twitter, two of the people I'm following, Ross Hill and Anne Wu, tweeted a link to the news article along with their own sub-140-character summary (i.e., a whisper in the global game of broken telephone):
Ross Hill tweeted, "USA actually bombed Australia's Great Barrier Reef this week" and Anne Wu said, "the coral reefs are dying yet the US is still bombing them."
In both cases, it sounds pretty bad, right? It makes you angry that the worlds largest military is doing something as blatantly stupid as dropping bombs on a harmless reef in the ocean. Damn the military!
But hold on. Let's check our facts, shall we?
If you read the article, you'll discover that what actually happened was a training mishap:
US Navy Commander William Marks, of the 7th Fleet Public Affairs, said the jets had planned to drop the bombs on a range on Townshend Island, but that was foiled when the range was not clear.
After several attempts, the jets were running low on fuel and could not land with the bombs they were carrying.
So they dropped the bombs because it would've been too dangerous to land on the aircraft carrier with the bombs still attached. OK, that's understandable. But the bombs exploded in the ocean and destroyed precious coral reef, right?
He said each bomb was jettisoned in a "safe, unarmed state and did not explode".
OK, so nobody "actually bombed" anything and nobody "is still bombing them". There was no explosion and it's unlikely that any reef was harmed at all.
Sure, leaving the bombs in the ocean will certainly be harmful to sea life, as they would corrode and leak harmful chemicals into the ocean over time. But the military is not doing anything about that either, right?
The US Navy is considering how to recover the bombs, which were dropped in a "deep channel" about 16 nautical miles south of Bell Cay, off the Capricorn Coast between Mackay and Rockhampton.
[...]
"The safety of personnel and the environment are our top priorities," Commander Marks said.
I'm not picking on Ross or Anne here at all. I just happened to see their tweets and I just happened to click through to the article to read what actually happened. (It seemed too unbelievable to me that the bombing was intentional.)
Their tweets led me to these thoughts on disinformation and helped me link the old game of broken telephone with something that's happening daily in modern adult life. They helped me recognize just how easy it is to spread false or misleading information when the message we're sharing is something sensational.
What led me to take this whole thing more seriously and write this essay was what happened next.
A few days after I saw Ross and Anne's tweets, I happened to see that the WikiLeaks Twitter account had also tweeted about this 'bombing' incident:
The WikiLeaks tweet reads, "US fighter jets bomb Australia's great barrier reef."
The BBC article, linked in WikiLeaks tweet, is different than the one that Ross and Anne shared, so I thought that maybe some new information had surfaced that proved the military was intentionally bombing the reef (WikiLeaks is, after all, known for leaking information).
Let's read and find out. The BBC article is short; it's only three paragraphs. Here's the second paragraph:
The two planes jettisoned four bombs in more than 50m (165 ft) of water, away from coral, to minimise damage to the World Heritage Site, the US navy said.
It's almost laughable how accurately the opposite message is being conveyed by a simple tweet. Except it's not laughable, because the WikiLeaks Twitter account has 1.9 million followers and 185 people retweeted that misleading message.
If each of those people who retweeted the message only had 100 followers (which is likely far below the real average), that's an additional 18,500 people who saw WikiLeak's tweet just from those retweets, an additional 18,500 people who heard a whisper because 185 people thought the message was worthy of sharing, a message that was quite different from the truth.
The article linked in the tweet by WikiLeaks had three paragraphs, a grand total of 74 words. How many of those 185 people who retweeted and shared the WikiLeaks message actually clicked on the link and verified the facts for themselves?
I'm sure neither Ross or Anne meant any harm by their tweets and I doubt that any of the 185 people who retweeted WikiLeaks meant any harm either. I also doubt any real harm was caused (the military can probably handle a little criticism).
However, Ross has 5,679 Twitter followers and Anne has 717; that's potentially 6,396 ears they whispered their misleading messages into. That's not even mentioning the 1.9 million WikiLeaks followers or the exponential effect of the people who retweeted WikiLeaks.
Whether any harm was done in this particular case is beyond the point. The point is that we're all participating in a global game of broken telephone and that we're all, myself included, responsible for what we share.
We need to be more careful.
Share Responsibly or Don't Share at All
What if the Internet was around when cigarettes were being marketed as 'good for you'? How many funny or sensational tweets containing cigarette-promoting ideas would've been retweeted, unknowingly contributing to the future death of millions?
We are the media now and that makes each one of us a media transmitters. Messages spread with our help. If someone in a game of broken telephone refused to pass along a message until they were certain they had it right, the truth would have a greater chance at survival.
Only we can stop the perpetuation of fabricated information. Unless we all start accepting this responsibility we risk assisting those who are pushing misinformation for their own agenda.
If you're going to share something, please, check the facts.
Recognize the power you hold in your hands as you communicate and share online. Recognize that when you share things today you can reach billions of people, not just those in your immediate vicinity or those who you know, but people all over the planet.
When in doubt, do what I do and leave it out. It's far better to share silence than to risk sharing false messages that could harm people.
If you don't know the facts, share questions instead of sensational assumptions. My dad always used to say, "when you assume, you make an 'Ass' out of 'U' and 'Me'."
Assume nothing. Reject sensational attention-seeking. The truth will always be more durable and long-lasting than hollow sensationalism.
Share the truth. Fix the broken telephone.
We're All Travelers
Quote Yourself
Try it a different way
Discontent with Contentedness
I've been doing a lot of thinking lately. In between thoughts of becoming a father (only a few weeks away...!) and supporting my newly forming family (is my income stable enough? are we spending too much?), I'm also thinking about health and longevity (am I taking care of my health? are we eating healthy? is our environment healthy for raising a baby?).
On what seems like the opposite end of the spectrum, I find myself thinking about the emerging and constantly evolving world of digital publishing, WordPress, the Internet, and social media.
How can I design things better? What technical skills or programming languages should I acquire next? How can I use my writing and knowledge to share what I'm doing with the world in a way that makes the world a better place?
How these two tracks of thought can even live side-by-side, inside the same brain, I don't know. It almost seems wrong to be thinking about one when the other feels astronomically more important.
But there must be more to life than just survival and living good, more to life than just... happiness, right?
I've never been content with contentedness.
Every now and then I'll recall a moment on Cocoa Beach, in Florida, sometime in early 2012. It was during one of my many twice-daily walks.
I've lived in Florida several times over the past few years, usually for a few months at a time. Whenever I lived there I would have a routine of walking on the beach in the morning and then driving to Starbucks to spend the day working on my laptop. In the evening, I'd take another solo hour-plus walk before sundown, sometimes walking until the stars came out and the darkness made it too difficult to see in front of my face.
These twice-daily walks helped me learn how important regular walking and fresh air is for my health and spiritual wellbeing; the activity seems to cleanse my soul in ways that I cannot describe.
One sunny day on the beach I stopped walking, looked out at the flat ocean, took in a deep breath of fresh ocean air, and felt an absolute sense of calmness flood my body, a sense of contentment so strong that even to this day recalling the memory floods my body with a sliver of that peace.
I had the freedom to go anywhere in the world and yet I felt content right where I was.
But it wasn't enough. That refresher was great, but it wasn't enough. Something inside me wanted to do something, to grow, to move, and to continue evolving. (I wrote a bit about this last year in Travel Notes: Thoughts on Florida1.)
This desire to do something, to grow and evolve--to question--, seems fundamental to who I am.
For example, when I'm tweaking my website and thinking about web design and user interaction--which I've been doing a lot lately--I always find myself thrown into deep thoughts about the future of the web, the future of human connectivity, the future of communication and knowledge-transfer, and the future of... well, the future of everything.
For the first few years of publishing to raamdev.com, I had a message that said "Under Construction". One day I realized that my entire life is constantly "under construction" and as a result so would my 'personal' website. It's been more than 12 years since I began publishing to raamdev.com and it's still "under construction", just like me. The only difference is that I'm not constantly announcing it.
**
I feel a sense of responsibility to re-think the status quo, to question everything, whether that be the status quo of how we educate and raise our children or the status quo of how digital authors should publish their work and connect with their audience.
The driving force behind this re-thinking of the status quo stems, I believe, from a recognition that our world is changing. It stems from a deeply felt understanding that we're at the cusp of a new era.
The thread that seems to weave through everything my life, whether it's thinking about how I'm going to home school my daughter or thinking about the design of a commenting form on a website, is simplicity. I'm constantly asking myself, "how can this be made more simple? what things that are assumed can be taken away? how can we reduce this to its essence?"
As a digital writer and publisher, I want to publish thoughts and essays online and communicate with my audience through the comments on those thoughts and essays.
But what if I want to spend the day away from my computer, playing with my daughter, for example?
I don't want to be looking around for a WiFi connection or waiting for my website to load and then logging into the WordPress dashboard to publish essays or reply to comments. That's archaic.
Before writing and publishing went digital, writers could simply look up from their notebook and then look back down. That was it. That's all there was to the physical act of switching modes.
Sure, they didn't publish things regularly like we can and do today, but when publishing today really just involves pressing a button on a web page, why does the entire task have to be more complicated than looking up or down from a notebook?
Why can't digital writing, publishing, and communication with readers be as simple as, let's say, sending an email from my phone (which is generally always connected to the Internet and always on me, like an old-fashioned notebook)?
Yes, I could just pick up an old-fashioned notebook and use that, but why should I have to create more work for myself transcribing those paper entries into digital entries? Besides, my handwriting skills are nonexistent so a paper notebook isn't an option.
There are certain tasks that are basic and fundamental to digital writers and publishers, but the tools and the processes don't yet exist to allow them to really live offline, the way pre-digital writers could.
Is it possible right now? Absolutely. But the processes we follow are largely dictated by the capabilities of the tools we use. Those tools are largely incomplete, designed with the online-world in mind instead of the offline world.
I'm going to start changing that by building tools and sharing systems that make sense for people who don't want to always be tied to a computer but still want to remain connected in a way that lets them communicate and share with the world.
I'm in a unique position to help bridge this gap because I understand how the technology works deeply enough to create new systems and build (or enhance, as is the case with open-source software like WordPress) tools to augment our offline life in a way that makes sense.
[I realize that there's an iPhone WordPress app that allows me to publish and reply to comments from my phone, but the app and the workflow has many flaws. Besides, I already use email for writing and communication; why should I need anything else?]
**
The status quo has never been more broken than it is today and that's a direct result of the fact that technology is changing our world faster than ever before. Part of what I feel responsible for is reflecting on those changes, challenging the status quo, and coming up with alternative solutions that make sense given the opportunities that technology makes possible.
Home schooling, for example, was far more difficult for parents just 30 years ago. If parents weren't already school teachers, they had limited resources and know-how to school their kids with. Their options were limited to the local library or paying for pre-designed courses that included all the books for schooling their kids at home (which is what my parents did).
Parents were lucky if they could even afford to home school their kids. If they didn't already have money set aside, or if one of the parents wasn't making enough income for the whole family, then finding the time to home school was nearly impossible, or at the very least extremely challenging: it meant that one or both of the parents spent the majority of their time working.
But today parents living in a modern society have almost unlimited access and opportunity by way of the Internet. They can learn new skills and put those skills to use by working online from home, or by building a business that allows them to work for themselves (as my parents did, except they did it without the Internet, the old-fashioned work-your-ass-off kind of way).
We now have amazing things like Google, Wikipedia, and KhanAcademy2. We have access to an international marketplace (eBay) from our bedroom. Every modern house has access to more knowledge than all humans of the past thousand years combined.
It's a home schooling dream-come-true. As a parent, you can sit in your house, make money at home, and you have access to everything. If your kid asks you a question and you don't know the answer, you can look it up on your phone and tell them. If you don't know Algebra, you can learn it yourself, for free, from home, and then help your kid learn.
The world is a different place today than it was yesterday, and it will be an even more different place tomorrow. The status quo today represents not just yesterday's old world, but that of hundreds of years of stagnation.
Conscious change is paramount to our evolution. If it's happiness that we seek, conscious evolution is the only way we'll attain happiness in a sustainable way.
Personalizing the WordPress Comment Reply Link
The default WordPress Comment Reply link, which shows up when threaded comments are enabled, is not very personalized. Every comment gets the same plain link that says "Reply":
Every now and then I will get someone who accidentally presses one of those reply links thinking they're leaving a new top-level reply for the post.
That might seem like a silly mistake, but it helped me to realize that if the comment reply link included the name of the person you're replying to, it would be more difficult to make that mistake.
We should do anything we can to remove ambiguity. Besides, personalized comment reply links are just plain cool.
It took me a bit of digging around but I finally came up with a solution. Add the following code to the bottom of your theme's functions.php file:
/*
* Change the comment reply link to use 'Reply to <Author First Name>'
*/
function add_comment_author_to_reply_link($link, $args, $comment){
$comment = get_comment( $comment );
// If no comment author is blank, use 'Anonymous'
if ( empty($comment->comment_author) ) {
if (!empty($comment->user_id)){
$user=get_userdata($comment->user_id);
$author=$user->user_login;
} else {
$author = __('Anonymous');
}
} else {
$author = $comment->comment_author;
}
// If the user provided more than a first name, use only first name
if(strpos($author, ' ')){
$author = substr($author, 0, strpos($author, ' '));
}
// Replace Reply Link with "Reply to <Author First Name>"
$reply_link_text = $args['reply_text'];
$link = str_replace($reply_link_text, 'Reply to ' . $author, $link);
return $link;
}
add_filter('comment_reply_link', 'add_comment_author_to_reply_link', 10, 3);
This code also takes into account the fact that some people might use more than a first name when they leave a comment. Having their whole name in the reply link would just look weird, so the code only uses the first name.
Here's what the comment reply links look like with the above code implemented:
And that's it! You can see this code in action on my site in the comments section. (Check out this post for a ton of threaded comments.)
Supporting Translations
A commenter pointed out that you can modify the code as follows to support translations:
If you're like me and using WordPress language files to translate the site change this line:
`$link = str_replace($reply_link_text, 'Reply to ' . $author, $link);`
to
`$link = str_replace($reply_link_text, __( 'Reply', 'nameofyourtheme' ).' '. $author, $link);`the `nameofyourtheme` string has to match the textdomain in your language file, in my case Im using the `twentytwelve` theme so I'll just type:
`$link = str_replace($reply_link_text, __( 'Reply', 'twentytwelve' ).' '. $author, $link);`
Please note that the `.' '.` is added to get a space between the your `"Reply"` string and `$author` variable.
Personalizing the Cancel Reply link
If you'd like to also personalize the 'Click here to cancel your reply' link to instead say "Cancel Reply to [author]", you can use the following code:
/*
* Change the comment reply cancel link to use 'Cancel Reply to
*/
function add_comment_author_to_cancel_reply_link($formatted_link, $link, $text){
$comment = get_comment( $comment );
// If no comment author is blank, use 'Anonymous'
if ( empty($comment->comment_author) ) {
if (!empty($comment->user_id)){
$user=get_userdata($comment->user_id);
$author=$user->user_login;
} else {
$author = __('Anonymous');
}
} else {
$author = $comment->comment_author;
}
// If the user provided more than a first name, use only first name
if(strpos($author, ' ')){
$author = substr($author, 0, strpos($author, ' '));
}
// Replace "Cancel Reply" with "Cancel Reply to "
$formatted_link = str_ireplace($text, 'Cancel Reply to ' . $author, $formatted_link);
return $formatted_link;
}
add_filter('cancel_comment_reply_link', 'add_comment_author_to_cancel_reply_link', 10, 3);
Simplicity
Values Without Conviction
Commonsense
Making 'Good' Choices
A tiny mountain of sand stood in my path, created by a community of ants who probably spent years of their life (days of mine) constructing a tunnel into the Earth. The thought of placing my foot down felt wrong and selfish.
I do a lot of thinking. I take every idle opportunity to think deeply and consider what I should or should not be doing.
When I'm walking around and looking down at the ground with a blank state of mind, I'm thinking about where I want to place my foot next, what spot makes the most sense.
The other day while I was walking to the train station, I approached a puddle in the road and found two doves sipping from the waters' edge. They began scuttling away as soon as I approached, keeping an equal distance from me with each step I took forward.
Doves have always struck me as an odd creature, more relaxed, as if they love not flying, as if they'd rather not be bothered to needlessly expend energy if they can avoid doing so.
It was then that I realized I had a choice: I could walk to the right of the puddle (closer to the doves) and they would surely feel outpaced and take flight, or I could walk to the left and they would remain on the ground, at ease with my distance.
So which way should I go, left or right?
In the end, either choice would take me to exactly the same place on the other side of the puddle, but it was obvious to me that one of those two choices would have would have a drastically different effect on the world around me.
If I felt a sense of entitlement--if I felt that my being born as a human gave me some inalienable right over all other life--then I might not care which direction I stepped; I'd feel entitled to do whatever I wanted.
But the simplistic notion that all life resides somewhere on a food chain, and that anything below your spot on the food chain is somehow worthy of less respect, is ignorant to say the least.
Life is more than a hierarchical order of things.
Carrying the Best Intentions
My friend Niall Doherty--not to pick on him, but because he recently wrote something that helped me learn more about myself--quit being vegan after two years of sticking with it, siting serious doubts around the three arguments that initially led him to the vegan lifestyle.
Reading through his doubts I quickly realized why I've always found myself drawn to veganism: it's not about the effect my diet has on the environment, or about avoiding any needless killing, or even about taking care of my own health.
For me, those things are just practical and logical bonuses on top of the real reason that I gravitate towards veganism.
It's the same reason why, when given a choice, I avoid stepping on an ant or scaring away the doves: my actions, no matter how trivial they may seem, affect the world around me and, as the one responsible for my actions, I have a duty to ensure that my actions carry the best intentions.
How many people do you know who wouldn't tense up or put their foot over the brake when a squirrel or any other small animal runs in front of their moving vehicle? A small animal poses absolutely no threat to the person inside the vehicle, and yet we risk danger to ourselves by slamming on the brakes or swerving on the road.
When our subconscious is presented with a choice between life and death we instinctively choose the action that preserves life, because non-violence is an integral part of human nature.
While all life has meaning, purpose, and value, a human existence grants me something unique to the animal kingdom: the ability to make conscious choices based on rational and empathetic thinking.
Because I'm human, I can choose left or right based on conscious thought.
Because I'm human, I can look at the world around me and ask myself how my small, seemingly insignificant actions today will affect the bigger picture tomorrow.
I'm able to think about how my actions are going to affect not only me, but how they're going to affect everything around me, and not just for today or tomorrow but for generations to come.
No other species on this planet can make such conscious and globally empathetic decisions. No other species can consciously recognize that its actions may be copied by others and therefore amplified to create change on a greater scale.
Setting a 'good' example that I would want others to follow is important to me, but so is feeling good about the choices that I make. Making choices that I'd want others to follow, it just so happens, usually leads to choices that make me feel good too.
I doubt that anyone saw my instantaneous decision to walk left around the puddle, but it felt good, just like stepping over the mountain of sand and choosing to eat plants instead of animals.
Perhaps I think this way because of an innate understanding that what affects everyone and everything around me eventually ends up affecting me too.
Globally Conscious Personal Choices
Earth is an ecosystem, a community of life, and we're all born with an innate understanding that what affects the community eventually affects us too.
Good choices, then, are those that are not only good for us, but also good for the community.
For most of human history, our community has consisted of a few hundred people, or a few thousand at most. Today we're living in a global community of more than 7 billion people, a community where what we buy, what we eat, and what we choose to do with our time has a measurable affect on all corners of the globe.
It's not enough to just think globally. We must also live globally and that means making globally conscious personal choices, choices that are made while being conscious and informed of how those choices will affect everyone else.
If everyone on the planet copied your personal choices would that be good or bad for the global community?